Soul Kiss by Scarlett Jacobs, Neil S. Plakcy

lunch. I had to talk to Daniel."
    "Uh-huh. Chelsea wouldn't shut up about you two."
    "Chelsea's a bitch."
    "And your point is?"
    We both laughed, and then we went on to talk about other stuff. The next day I sat with Daniel again, and Mindy followed my lead, going to sit with a boy named Brandon she liked. That left Chelsea and Brie by themselves, and I felt bad about abandoning my best friend to Chelsea Scalzitti.
    "I've been thinking about what you said yesterday," Daniel said, as we sat down to eat. "About the brain thing. It made me start to wonder why my brain works the way it does."
    "What do you mean?"
    "I've always taken it for granted that I can read so fast, that I can make these connections in my head. I thought that other smart kids must think the same way. But then as I got older and started to know other kids, and study with them, I realized that wasn't the truth."
    He ate some of his sandwich. I didn't say anything, just waiting for him to finish his thought.
    "So I started to think I was some kind of freak. I wondered if I was a genius or an idiot savant or something. So I read all about them, as much as I could, but nothing seemed to fit. No one described feeling or thinking the way I did." He looked up at me. "Until you."
    "But this is all new to me," I said. "I never could read that fast, or think that way, until I met you."
    We just looked at each other. Both of us were completely baffled. "Maybe we should do some more research," I said. "Like in the library or something."
    He had to work that afternoon at ComputerCo, and I had literary magazine with Miss Margolis, so we agreed to meet in the library the next afternoon and see what we could figure out. They didn't have a big selection of books, but at least there were computers there and Internet access.
    I walked to history with him, and he whispered something to Mindy as we walked in. She switched seats with him, so that he was sitting next to me. That afternoon I read ahead a few chapters in our history book. It was interesting the way things started coming together--I could see the way that the French revolution had inevitably led to Napoleon's rise, and how the way he organized laws spread around the world. For the first time, I found history interesting.
    The next day at lunch, Brie and Chelsea attached themselves to a couple of cheerleaders and made their own new group. It was strange to see things shifting. But I had always known that we were going to split up when we went to college, make new friends and develop new interests, and while that was scary it was also something I was looking forward to. I figured it wasn't a bad idea to get a head start.
    I did worry, though, that if I broke up with Daniel (God, I was thinking about breaking up when we weren't really even dating) that I wouldn't have friends to go back to. I'd end up a solitary geek, sitting by myself at lunch while everyone gossiped about me.
    Daniel and I walked to the library together after history. Shyly, Daniel reached out to take my hand, and I put mine in his. I guess that meant we were really boyfriend and girlfriend.
    His hand was cool in mine, and it felt nice to be that connected to him. We passed Brie, on her way to her piano lesson, and she didn't say anything, but I saw her look at our hands.
    In the library we grabbed adjacent computers. "How do we start?" I asked, as I opened up a browser.
    "How much do you know about how the brain works?"
    "Nothing more than we learned in biology. And I forgot most of that already."
    "So start there. If you could understand that article you read in the paper on Sunday, you can probably figure out a lot just by reading stuff about how the brain functions. I'm going to see if I can find anything about people sharing brains."
    "Yuck."
    "Not like that. Did you ever watch Star Trek ?"
    I groaned. "My father is a total science fiction geek. He used to make us watch those old episodes when we were kids."
    "So you know what a Vulcan mind meld